A Review of Najwa Barakat, Oh, Salaam! Trans. Luke Leafgren. Interlink, 2015. Once upon a time, Beirut was a famously cosmopolitan capital, its cafes and clubs overflowing with culture in multiple languages. Riven and demolished by decades of sectarian conflict, civil war, and the predations of its neighbors, the city and its country, . . .
Read MorePart Two (Link to Part One) In the modern era, reading as well as writing are often solitary acts. Ulysses of course has its public celebration every Bloomsday, while Finnegans Wake has inspired countless monthly or even weekly reading groups. Has your engagement with Joyce been a solo journey, or do you count yourself amongst other . . .
Read MorePart One Marcelo Zabaloy must be a remarkable man, with no shortage of literary ambition and ability. Having completed an unabridged translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses (published in 2015 by el Cuenco de Plata in Buenos Aires), Zabaloy is in the final stages of his next translation. The book? James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. While Ulysses is a certainly a . . .
Read MoreThis year August marked the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the end of the American war in the Pacific. Had I not been involved with Global Zero, an organization that works to eliminate nuclear weapons, I would likely have spent August 6th and 9th working at my . . .
Read MoreNeil LindsayVice President, MarketingAmazon410 Terry Avenue NorthSeattle, Washington 98109 August 25, 2015 Dear Mr. Lindsay: After reading the August 16th New York Times article about Amazon, I believe I have a lot of what your company desperately needs in an employee. I’m not just a talented and conscientious worker, I also have a soul. And . . .
Read MoreOn The Stanford Prison Experiment (Part Two) (Back to Part One) A cooper, traditionally, made barrels. Also casks, buckets, tubs, butter churns, hogsheads, firkins, tierces, rundlets, puncheons, pipes, tuns, butts, pins, and breakers. Yet cooperage doesn’t end there. As the psychologist himself understands it, the central thesis of the 1971 Zimbardo study is precisely . . .
Read MoreOn The Stanford Prison Experiment (Part One) The trailer for the film dramatization of The Stanford Prison Experiment concludes with words from the actor Billy Crudup, who plays the psychologist Philip Zimbardo. We first see Zimbardo hang down his head, then the film’s title appears, and then there is a shot of a desk in a . . .
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The frontispiece of Visions and Jewels, an autobiography published by Henry Holt in 1926, is a photograph of a bust of the author, Moysheh Oyved (1885-1958), created by his friend Jacob Epstein, the great twentieth-century sculptor. Oyved, unlike Epstein, has been almost completely forgotten, but his story and his works deserve to be lifted . . .
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Last June my wife and I spent a few days in Hony, a quaint Belgian town by the Ourthe River. A very good friend of mine recently moved there, and, knowing that we were at Maria’s mother in Bonn, he invited us to visit him. The trip from Bonn to Hony, which . . .
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Domenico Remps, “Cabinet of Curiosities” (1690s) This is a small story about world literature. In high school I was a bookish kid in a town with no bookstore. When I went to college the library immediately became the center of my life; I spent most of my undergraduate years reading my way . . .
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